I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here. If I release an open source SDK for talking to an API, it's still open source even if the underlying API isn't.

> I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here.

Because it literally says "open-source AI".

It says "open-source AI assistant".

Be serious.

I'm dead serious. The assistant talking to the AI is open source. How else would you describe it? You guys are really doing everything in your power to miscredit this. I really don't understand the hostile attitude.

This threads reminds of a repeated scene in The Office, where one man repeatedly calls himself the “assistant manager”, and is constantly corrected as “assistant to the manager.”

Open source AI assistant.

Open source assistant to the AI.

Assistant _to the_ Regional Manager!

Seriously, this is such a misleading redefinition of a common phrase that it makes me suspicious of the whole project's trustworthiness. If they're playing shell games with "well, technically I didn't say that I meant this phrase the way it's most commonly used in this same industry", then what else are they redefining and misleading about?

I'd encourage you to look into how Siri and "hey Google" and even Cortana and Bixby all describe themselves: as "AI assistants". Nobody thinks "the thing that takes audio and throws it into an AI model is the assistant _to the_ AI". They think of the whole package as their AI assistant — that is, an assistant that is an AI.

That's how the phrase is most commonly used, and even if it were a new turn of phrase, parsing "adjective noun" out into "noun to the noun" is wildly unnatural.

So what should they call this to avoid getting hated on? People are saying this is "just a thin wrapper" but I don't think that's the case (and even if it was, what's the problem?). This is their architecture: https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj/blob/master/docs/khoj_archit...

I'd call it "an OpenAI client that also has something like grep built in."

Would you consider an "open source database connector" to be a new, open source database that also has a connector?

That's the problem of the English language, it doesn't have compound words. A database connector is a connector to a database. An AI personal assistant is a AI powered assistant that I can use to do tasks for me. If it's an assistant help using an AI that's something completely different.

You're just making up arbitrary rules that you apply inconsistently. My language has compound words and it wouldn't make any difference in this case. "An open source AI assistant" refers to the assistant in the same way "an inexperienced lab assistant" refers to the assistant being inexperienced and not the lab.

> You're just making up arbitrary rules that you apply inconsistently. My language has…

I’m not sure what your language has, but you definitely hit the nail on the head with your inadvertent description of the English language: (seemingly) arbitrary rules applied inconsistently.

You’re absolutely correct that an inexperienced lab assistant does not refer to the lab.

The GP isn’t wrong either.

Given how many people made the same reading (even to the point of the same joke), I'd argue they're arbitrary rules applied largely consistently, except when some marketing droid shows up.

No, because the common usage of "database connector" has consistently taught me enough context to expect "a connector to a database," much like the common usage of "AI assistant" has consistently taught me enough context to know that I should expect "an AI that acts as an assistant."

Open source Assistant for AI

Exactly, it doesn't say AI open source assistant. Everything mentioned after open source should be open source.

I understand your concerns, but let me zoom out a little here and talk about the nature of open source.

Open source means that the source code which is developed for a piece of software is fully open (i.e, anyone can read, fork, modify the code) for what they are installing.

According to your definition, it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS. All of those are closed sourced software.

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-so...

That being said, we are planning to integrate an open source LLM soon. When we added chat, Open AI just had the best one, but the space is changing so quickly. We're both super enthusiastic about seeing all the open source tooling for this stuff evolve.

The problem is not that there is "glue" to closed-source apps. It's that the essential core of your product, without which your product has no content or meaningful use — is _someone else's closed-source model._

If I market "a totally creative-commons blockbuster Hollywood movie", but my actual product is just a creative-commons-licensed set of driving directions to some nearby movie theater where you can buy tickets to see the same copyrighted movies anyone else is offering, then _the fundamental essence_ of what I'm offering is not, in fact, creative-commons. I sold people on a _movie_ with that license, and then failed to deliver.

That's what you've done here.

To be clear, the fatal flaw is that your marketing is dishonest about what your product currently is, not that your product is something nobody wants. I'd recommend either making your marketing honest, or else making your product live up to what your marketing promises.

_Then_ you do the PR push on HN.

> it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS.

Yeah, nobody did open source before those things existed...